Hume goes on in this section to discuss four reasons why he feels that there isn't or ever has been enough evidence to prove miracles to be true. He starts off by saying that there has never been a miracle that has had a large number of trustworthy people testify for it. In order for a miracle to be considered possible or true, there would have to be a decent number of sane people that agree on the same event occurring and can give the same details of the event. The second reason Hume gives is basically that our imagination runs wild and that although we should believe we should believe what we have known to be true in the past, we can't help but believe things that surprise us. The third reason Hume gives us against miracles is that a majority of reports of miracles occur amongst ignorant or uneducated people who do not have the sense to question the testimony of a fellow citizen. The final reason he gives to doubt miracles is that miracles from each religion differ and oppose each other and therefore could never be agreed upon by every religion in the world.
I definitely agree with Hume on this subject. Miracles have never had any evidence to support them and a majority of the time, when they are investigated, they are explained pretty quickly. I think he is right in assuming that people love the unknown and love to believe things that surprise them rather than use their common sense to reason that the experience could not be true.
2 comments:
I certainly dont doubt that many times miracles are claimed to have happened because of religious fanatacism or because of psychological dependencies on faith-based beliefs. I do doubt the conclusiveness of Hume's argument. At one point he gives an example of a miracle that he had heard of- it was reported by a lot of people, and then even investigated firsthand by learned men, and it was still not discovered to be false, or at least no one could explain what was actually happening if it in fact wasn't a miracle. Hume says that the way we can be sure that it was not is because it contradicts natural law. But this is begging the question. Its like saying that miracles are impossible because miracles are impossible. Hume doubts the actual existence of natural laws, so how can he use them as an argument for why miracles cannot happen? It may be that miracles are highly improbable, but who's to say that they can be ruled out? If there is a God(this point can be dismissed if one doesn't believe that there could possibly be a God, but I would also like to see a perfect proof in favor of atheism), why could there not be miracles?
everything has a cause so a miracle is just like seeing existance being created. I don't think it really says anything about god persay but, maybe something about existance. I think eventually we should come to know the cause.
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